Pair.com

March 20, 2004 · Comments

Years ago, my very first momathome.com website was hosted with Pair.com. Their FTP only account (which they still have, at the same price) was only $5.95 month including “vanity” domain.

They were an excellent host, however as time went on I outgrew the basic FTP account (needed more email address, custom CGI, MySQL, etc.) I wasn’t ready to spend a lot per month to get the features I wanted so I moved on to other hosts.

For the last year I’ve been hosting my sites with ICDSoft.com. Feature-packed and fast for only $40 per *year* ($50 for the first site, discounted for additional sites). As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, their tech support is outstanding. Tickets are answered within 10-15 minutes, tops. However, one client wasn’t particularly happy. The site itself was fast, but the POP3 server would act up unexpectedly. Tech support was sympathetic but there was nothing obviously wrong. He also wanted server-side junk mail filtering. ICDSoft has SpamBayes installed, but it’s all or nothing. You set the sensitivity level and email that fails is bounced to sender. Not good for a commercial client. And finally he wanted anonymous FTP which wasn’t an option. We talked about it, and together we agreed that we were better off moving the site and he was more than willing to pay the $20-30 a month it would cost.

Rather than shop around and take my chances on other people’s recommendations, I just went right to Pair. I know they have an impeccable reputation and the “Advanced” account meets all my client’s requirements for just $17.95 a month. The domain transfer went through yesterday and so far so good. This afternoon, I got this email:

bq.. Hello,

This is just a followup message to your recent signup with us. The purpose is to make sure that everything is going as expected with your account.

I see that so far, your site has been uploaded to the web server, and your domain has been switched to our DNS server. Looks like everything is good so far.

If you do have any problems with the account, or any questions please let me know. There is some additional information on the advanced account, and how we can be contacted below.

Thanks,
Matt L.
pair Networks
support@pair.com

p. I know that this is probably an auto-generated email, but it was still nice that someone/something took the time to make sure that there was a site up and the name pointers were correctly set.

I am sure there are many cheaper hosts out there, probably with more features. But when you have to make a quick switch and you want to please a client it’s nice to feel that you’ve made a good, solid decision. The experience made me think about my own site. I’m getting a major redesign itch which I’ve been working through in Fireworks this week. Maybe I’ll have something to upload in the next week or so, and switching servers is always a good way to redesign without worry about messing up a “live” site. I really don’t have another reason at the moment to switch this site, although having access to server error logs, Telnet ability and some other little things would be nice. It’s certainly something to consider.

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